Everyone wants their online stores to be attractive. That's the fact.
Some want their stores to be dynamic with multiple features and custom sections, while others lean towards a minimalist style. Shopify Pipeline Theme can be an option if you want to bring a classic and basic scrolling experience to visitors with your store, especially for DIY store owners.
It gives you both fundamental and enough advanced features to make your store a “charmer”. Sometimes, simplicity can be tempting.
However, to make sure if Pipeline is the suitable theme for your business, we need to dig deeper into its key features and how to set up your Shopify store with it. That's what we’re doing in today's article, and we're going to take you through:
- An Overview of The Shopify Pipeline Theme
- Shopify Pipeline Theme Key Features
- How to Build Your Shopify Store with Pipeline Theme
- Do People Like Pipeline Theme?
- 5 Store Examples with Pipeline Theme
- So, Is Pipeline Worth It?
An Overview of The Shopify Pipeline Theme
As for the Pipeline theme’s general background, Groupthought is the developer and author behind it. Their works, Story and Pipeline, are well-known for being clean with lovely designs.
You can preview the Pipeline theme demo here.
Pipeline costs $140 for a one-time purchase (the price is cheaper than most of the paid themes on the Shopify Theme Store), and you can freely update the theme with its latest versions. The Pipeline theme has grown with Shopify for many years, and at the moment, the newest version is the fifth generation. For more information about the theme's release note, you can check it out here.
According to Rvere, among 83 Shopify themes that they've audited, Pipeline ranks #30 for loading speed. Overall, the metrics for Speed Index, Time to First Bite, First Contentful Paint, and Time to Interactive are lower than the average time, which is good. Just the First Meaningful Paint is higher than the average by around 201 milliseconds.
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Pipeline Theme Styles
1 - Light
The Light style represents a typical example of a clean and light design. You can see basic navigation with logo on the left and menu items with dropdown options on the right on the top. It's straightforward when there's a full-width and product-focused banner image, followed by collection lists and a featured collection. This can help visitors know what your business is about in just 5 seconds of scrolling.
Also, the white background theme color with light grey “ITC Johnston” - Serif type of text font brings a decent feeling of a smooth and classic store layout.
2 - Bright
If you pay attention closely, Bright is even simpler than the previous style. Under the complete hero image are featured products and a slideshow of custom banners. The homepage ends with a “news" section and some custom info blocks.
However, Bright has a more radiant color scheme than the Light version, and the overlay header makes the homepage look modern yet still basic.
3 - Dark
With Dark style, the sticky navigation is outstanding with a video banner right on the top, which creates a tougher vibe than the other two, an adventurous store look.
However, we can still see how the clean design is applied here when the modular content blocks create a compact and clutter-free layout.
Who’s Pipeline Theme Ideal For?
- Merchants who love minimalism, clean and modern designs.
- Those who want to buy a Premium theme on the Shopify theme store but consider a more affordable price.
- Merchants have Shopify stores with large catalogs.
- Those who want to showcase big images in their stores but with a simple design.
Read more: How to Build Your Online with Shopify Parallax Theme
Shopify Pipeline Theme Key Features
So, what can Pipeline offer you? Here are some highlights:
- Multi-column menu: Pipeline is suitable for Shopify stores that have a large menu and catalogs. Merchants can create a mega menu easily with the Pipeline theme, and can even display products under the menu items so that people click on the product directly from the navigation.
- Modular-style homepage: Pipeline gives you multiple sections to display content on the homepage. The outstanding point is the modular layout. Merchants will showcase their brand and content with organized but stylish blocks, which is cool because they help keep the store clean and make it more modern in the look.
- Parallax effect: The theme is optimized for large images with an amazing parallax effect. If you worry that your homepage is too basic and not attractive enough, you can enable this effect to enhance visitors’ browsing experience.
- Advanced product filtering: You can display a sidebar menu on collection pages in which your products can be sorted out by tags. Some common categories are brand, color, size, or product type. When Pipeline gives you this feature, it can increase the chance of turning visitors into customers for a good user experience.
- Content sections on the product page: If you want to add your product information into tabs, Pipeline can support you with organizing and displaying them on your product page. It's a wonderful choice for merchants who sell products with a great amount of description and information.
How to Build Your Shopify Store with Pipeline Theme
01 - General Settings
You don’t start adding content sections and build your homepage right away. Stick to your business plan, go to the theme settings, and set up the general features first.
- Choose the right color palette and typography. A merchant should know the suitable color scheme for their brand because it will go with your brand image in the long run. Background colors, text, button colors should be all mixed and matched in a harmonious way, and they should be consistent throughout pages that have the same function. It goes the same with typography.
- Set up social media, favicon, and checkout. These are optional. However, having social media info displayed on your website is indispensable because not only does it give customers various ways to reach you, but it also draws considerable traffic from your online shop to other channels that you're promoting your brand.
- Customize header and footer. You can select different header styles that suit your taste, add the brand logo in the header, and even insert products, images, or collections under the navigation. For the Footer, there're sections to add your menus, custom text, and newsletter signup.
02 - Use High-quality Images
Although the Pipeline theme layout is simple, you can still captivate your audience by presenting large and high-resolution images on the homepage. Visual content is always a factor that draws people’s attention at the first moment they land on your online shop.
Remember to crop your images beforehand to make sure they are responsive both on mobile and desktop versions. A plus point for the Pipeline theme is they have a great source of support documents to help you with image sizing. Just search “image size" in their help center, you can find a ton of articles related to the topic.
03 - Utilize Video Feature
The video feature helps create stunning visual effects on your website. It also a creative and effective way to deliver your messages to the audience. With Pipeline theme, merchants can insert Youtube or Vimeo links of their videos to showcase them on the homepage. You can add video as media content for product variant images on the product page, as well.
The theme even supports adding a cover image or thumbnail to your video, so it would be great if you could display a featured image of your main products there. Besides these basic features, users can have an MP4 looping video hero on the homepage or full-width Youtube or Video videos.
There’ll be some coding involved for those advanced customizations. But, don't worry because the Pipeline support team has detailed tutorial articles for that.
04 - Feature Your Products and Collection Lists
If you want to promote your best products and collections, don't hesitate to display them on the homepage. It's a critical strategy to attract visitors and let them click on the "add to cart" button right on the homepage.
05 - Use Icon Columns to Present USP
USP or Unique Selling Propositions are what distinguishes your brand from other competitors. By showing these values on the homepage, it can ingrain in people's minds about your brand image and what values your business can give to them.
Pipeline theme allows users to add “Icon columns" with demo icons and headings so that they can easily edit and customize their content. Our recommendation is this section, along with your hero banners, should be clear and short to leave a great impact on visitors. It’d be better if you can show the USP as soon as you can on the homepage to catch people's attention.
06 - Set Up Collection Page
People will love it when they have a good browsing experience on your store, which means this increases the chance of getting them to buy your products. You should utilize the sidebar filter feature of the Pipeline theme to categorize your product into styles, colors, brands, and so on to help visitors sort out what they are interested in quickly.
In the backend settings, the “collection filters" section is easy to customize. Users can choose to hide it by default, or show navigation menu items, collections, or tag filters for the sidebar menu.
07 - Customize Product Page
The Pipeline theme tends to give you space to display huge product photos or videos on the product page, but you can select the size displayed if needed. The product page layout, in general, is pretty clean and simple.
One great thing about the product page features is that Pipeline gives you an option to add custom tabs under or next to the product image. So, if you have a large amount of product information, you can organize them in the tab section.
Do People Like Pipeline Theme?
So far, the theme has been receiving positive feedback from nearly 150 merchants on the Shopify Theme Store. Based on our observation, here are the TOP 3 reasons why they love Pipeline theme:
- They love the lovely design. It looks simple but still aesthetic.
- Pipeline theme is really easy to set up in the backend interface.
- They are impressed by the great support service and documentation.
Our thoughts about Pipeline Theme?
What we like:
- The design is clean and simple but still modern.
- The theme has the layout and mobile responsiveness.
- Their support documents are top-notch. They even have video tutorials and gifs inside to depict the steps for setting up a section.
- Pipeline theme supports building the Lookbook page and FAQ page.
- It's cheaper than most of Shopify Themes on the Shopify Theme Store.
What we don't like:
- They only have email support (no chat support), which is not convenient to get a reply immediately when you need instant support.
- They should have more options for mobile responsiveness in the editor.
- There are no cart customization options.
- The theme lacks flexible options to edit the content sections. Merchants will need to edit the theme code or need a page builder app like PageFly, for example, for advanced modification. PageFly can work fine with the Pipeline theme once you publish it, so you can give it a try with the link below.
Design Your Own Shopify Store With No Limit
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5 Store Examples with Pipeline Theme
#1 - KØBN
#2 - The Store at MAD
#3 - Saint Martin Bookshop
#4 - Workshop Living UK
#5 - Altamont
News: Shopify is releasing Online Store 2.0, with Dawn Theme as the default debut theme, which is radically different from all existing Shopify Theme. What is the big changes? And why it's called the next-generation theme design?
So, Is Pipeline Worth It?
We do recommend the Pipeline theme to those who seek out a clean and smart design theme for their Shopify stores. If you love simplicity, Pipeline is the one that’s worth the price.
For merchants who want more customization with dynamic features, perhaps Pipeline isn't the right theme. You need to pay higher for other premium theme choices. But all in all, it's just a personal choice.
Click this button to try Shopify Pipeline Theme.
Haven't opened a Shopify store yet? Check out the link below:
